Word: akhmatova
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...colonnaded auditorium of the House of Physicians, other Muscovites listen transfixed to a recording of poet Anna Akhmatova reading her long- banned poem Requiem in a deep, rasping voice. When the melancholy cadences end, literary historian Lydia Chukovskaya, 82, recounts how she memorized the verse from scraps of paper that Akhmatova had handed her before the poet burned them in an ashtray...
...stars of death stood over us./ And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." So wrote Anna Akhmatova, perhaps Russia's finest woman poet, in Requiem, a moving testimony to those who kept vigils outside prison gates for loved ones swept away in the Stalinist reign of terror. Written between 1935 and 1940, the poem was not officially published in full until last year...
...Akhmatova, whose former husband was executed by the Bolsheviks, was denounced by Soviet authorities and only received some recognition in the years before her death in 1966. So there was a touch of poetic justice last week when Pravda announced that an asteroid discovered by Soviet astronomers will be named Akhmatova in honor of the centennial of her birth next year...
...wasn't exactly what Akhmatova had in mind. In the Epilogue to Requiem, she wrote: "And if my country ever should assent/ to casting in my name a monument,/ I should be proud to have my memory graced,/ but only if the monument be placed/ . . . here, where I endured three hundred hours/ in line before the implacable iron bars...
...more than 40 years, Wilbur has written poetry that garnered both critical acclaim and public recognition, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Smith, and generously given foreign authors an English-speaking readership, translating works by, among others, Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Andrei Voznesensky and Joseph Brodsky. His words have been sung on Broadway, set to Leonard Bernstein's score in the musical Candide (1956). And last fall Wilbur became the second person, after Robert Penn Warren, to assume the title, established by an act of Congress...